As a marketer, are you satisfied with the results of your attention grabbing advertisements, and persuasive content? Has the inclusion of digital media channels in your marketing mix proven effective for your organization? You may rely on data from the digital media to find answers to such questions. The plethora of data available in the digital age may either overwhelm you, or make you complacent.

Well, that could be your biggest marketing blind spot. No doubt, digital media is the most powerful marketing strategy, offering useful data to measure the impact of your tactics against the set goals. However, without a deeper analysis of the data, you may not be able to find the elusive answer to why a certain action did not take place. Software that power the digital channels mostly answer the “what” and not the “why” of that particular issue.

An analysis of consumer behavior from the data available online, as well as off-line helps answer the why of many marketing questions that your organization faces. Such data analysis will help you find answers to questions including:

Who your customers are and where do they come from?

Experience shows that businesses that understand its customers like their family have achieved exceptional success. Knowing your customers is the key to understanding the WHY of the behavior of your customers. Customer analytics offers great insights into their profiles and their requirements, desires, demands, buying behaviors, preferences, etc. Accordingly, you can segment customers based on a variety of factors.

By making use of these tools you can better understand your customer profiles, the demographics they come from, their age group, gender, the source they come from whether from websites, mobile apps or in- store kiosks, etc. With the use of cross-channel and multi-device tracking and analytics, you can gain interesting insights about customer behavior.

What do my customers need?

Your product or service may be an excellent one, but without customer demand for such offerings, your efforts in bringing out such products/services will go in vain. Understanding what your target markets, customers need is of prime importance in attaining business success. Answers to questions such as:

Who your customers are?

What products do they buy, and why do they buy?

Who do they buy such products from currently?

Are you listening to your customers? What are they saying on social channels?

Do your customers empathize with your brand?

Have you given your customers enough choices?

Marketers have lots of data but not enough insights. Analytics can help in identifying what your customers actually need.

How do my customers perceive my brand?

Knowing how well your customers receive and perceive your brand is another crucial element of a successful business. Once you have a measure of your brand’s awareness among the target market you can fill the gaps between the target brand penetration and positioning versus the actual perception. What your customer say on social media and other channels matter a lot and it’s important to listen to those conversations and wherever possible steer them in the right direction.

Surveys are best tools for eliciting information on how much customers regard and appreciate your brand.

Modern digital tools help in listening to the opinions and perceptions of people about your brand. Social media analytics is of primary importance here.

With the help of social media content and posting useful information on various online and off-line channels you can improve how customers perceive your brand.

Who are my competitors and what are they doing?

Digital analytics, apart from helping understand customer behavior patterns, also helps fight competition and make smart moves than your competitors in attracting more customers towards your products or services. The modern digital analytics tools offer a plethora of data that can help you analyze what works for various businesses, what customers like and what they dislike.

Analyzing the data from social media and other digital channels can bring great insights into your customers’ needs, and competitors’ strengths and weakness. Use this digital data effectively to offer products and services that are much better than what your competitors offer. Sometimes competition can crop up from places that you never even pondered about, for instance, customers today are preferring to buy from independent labels instead of big brands in a certain geography; it’s only through analytics can you find out who your competitors are and how you can compete successfully.

How can I gauge the impact of various teams on the results?

With an effective creative exchange of ideas within the workforce, you can achieve success in your business. Digital media helps employees of different departments and teams within an organization to connect, share ideas, views, get creative, offer optimization suggestions that challenge the conventional methods, etc. It becomes imperative for businesses to unveil programs that encourage collaboration among different teams.

Analytics can help in putting data from different teams together and give a coherent picture and in turn generate insights that are unique and practical in real-life scenarios. For instance, how marketing is having an impact on sales and the kind of changes that can be done in one department to bring improvement to the other. You can use digital media analytics to measure the success of such collaborative policies of your organization.